EEG method

How do we make decisions as consumers? What do we pay attention to, and how do our initial responses predict our final choices? To what extent are these processes unconscious and cannot be reflected in overt reports? This course will provide you with an introduction to some of the most basic methods in the emerging fields of consumer neuroscience and neuromarketing. You will learn about the methods employed and what they mean. You will learn about the basic brain mechanisms in consumer choice, and how to stay updated on these topics. The course will give an overview of the current and future uses of neuroscience in business.

从本节课中

Emotions & Feelings, Wanting & Liking

In this module, everything is about emotions and feelings, and the relationship between emotions and preference.
As we will see, our minds have a dual side: a conscious and an unconscious response and motivation, which are crucial to understanding consumer preference and choice. Indeed, unconscious emotional responses may turn out to be driving consumer choice to the same - or even larger - degree than conscious feelings. Are conscious feelings a mere after-the-fact rationalization upon conscious choice?

与讲师见面

Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy

PhD in Neurobiology, Certified Neuropsychologist & Assistant Professor in Marketing & NeuroscienceHead of the Center for Decision Neuroscience, Department of Marketing at Copenhagen Business School, and Head of Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance at Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre

>> HI, I'm Dalia Badziunaite.

I'm coming from Center of Decision Neuroscience.

I am a PhD student in here and basically what I do I

investigate the different kind of choices in different kind of environments.

So basically how brands are affecting our decisions,

how products are affecting our decisions, what is the impact of

ads to our neurobiological and neuropsychological processes.

I'm going to be assisting Thomas in this course, and

today I'm going to present different kind of tools we are using here in

our lab to investigate non-conscious aspects of the choices.

And why is it important to understand the unconscious aspect of your choice?

Think about your own daily life.

In the morning you wake up while turning on your iPhone and checking the Facebook.

What is that?

It's just non-conscious addiction.

When you think about the supermarket choices, you enter the supermarket.

Most of the time you end up with more goods than you think of before.

So when we think about applying different kind of tool to

investigate non-conscious aspects of a choice.

We can do it in two different kind of environments.

We can do it in the very controlled lab environment where we are now, in here.

And we can do it as well in in-store setting.

Where actually people are facing the more ecologically valid situations where they

have different kind of social interactions, and

much more stimuli around them.

>> Neural marketing methods can be used both in lab settings and

in mobile settings.

Basically that means that we can use stationary setups with stationary

computers in, where people are facing a computer and wearing either EEG or GSR,

and are being measured for their brain responses or their eye fixations.

Alternatively, we can also use mobile EEG and mobile eye tracking to measure how

people are responding while they're in, for example, a store environment.

>> So, when we think about two different kind of environments, what is

the difference of studying the choices is the control of different kind of factors.

When we think about the lab we can

actually study the choices which are in the much controlled situations.

So for instance the ad effects, in there we can recreate the real environment where

a person is sitting in front of a TV and seeing different kinds of

ads in the middle of his documentary, favorite documentary.

Or, another example could be the unconscious aspect of preference,

taste preference.

For instance, you can give the participant in the lab, different kind of wines

or chocolate, while showing different kind of brands or price information.

And not only ask how much they like it,

but actually investigate their neural reactions, as well as visual reactions.

>> Eye tracking is normally used by using infrared cameras that

are measuring where people are looking.

They're picking up the pupils of each eye and they're measuring where

people are looking, as long as you've calibrated the system perfectly.

What you can also use with the eye tracking is to measure pupil dilation and

even how people are moving forward and backwards towards the screen.

You can use eye tracking both as a stationary setup,

where the eye tracker is mounted typically under the screen or

as part of a piece of glasses that you are wearing.

But the mechanism is typically the same using infrared camera in both instances.

>> So to investigate the consumer choices and

basically the decision making processes in lab.

We usually apply different kind of tools,

the combination of different kind of tools.

And to, to investigate the visual information,

basically how fast we fixate on the brand or the ad, as well as if we

know the certain elements that the brand or the ad wants to communicate to us.

As well as the pupil dilation that, that tells us about emotional reaction we have.

>> EEG, or electroencephalogram, is the method we are using.

Electrodes, positioned on the outside of the skull,

to measure the electrical discharges from the brain.

Electrical discharges comes mainly from the dendrites of each cells.

It's a receiving end of each cell.

And what we are measuring are different frequencies of the brain.

We can distinguish between different frequencies and

different changes in the frequencies across the skull.

>> To investigate different kind of neural reactions we have we use this EEG,

which we combine together with the eye tracker.

What we can do with that,

we can actually measure the brain reaction via these electrodes see in here.

So while EEG connected to the eye tracker we

can actually not only see if the person noticed something, but

actually if he was engaged, what, what was the work load of information?

At the same time when the person is watching different kind of advertisement

or commercial on the eye tracker we can as well track their facial expressions and

identifies seven basic emotions.

So for example if you would have a situation where you would be very

interested in the motivation score of the person looking at the different product or

interacting with a different kind of stimuli in the shop.

Then you should take into account only the prefrontal cortex, and

find a motivation asymmetry score that you

would calculate while extracting the data only from the frontal electrodes.

>> Pupil dilation can be caused by three different things.

It can be caused by changes in brightness,

were we know that increased brightness is related to pupil constriction.

And changes in task difficulties,

such as doing a difficult task actually increases pupil dilation.

And finally, changes in emotional responses, so increased arousal for

example is related to increased pupil dilation.

Recent technological advances allows us now to use mobile EEG and

mobile eye tracking to better understand how people are performing and

responding inside, for example, a store environment.

We can use mobile eye tracking to measure where people are looking.

And we can use mobile EEG to then assess how they

are responding both emotionally and cognitively.

And by using this, we can better predict and

understand what works in a store environment, when people are stressed.

But also how new products and pricing, for

example, is leading to changes in consumer behaviour.

>> So, the same principle as in the store, applies as in the lab.

For measuring different kind of neuro-reactions, we use the same EEG, and

the same EEG metrics.

And we combine it with the eye tracking glasses.

So, instead of having a big computer in the store running after you,

you have the glasses walking with you.

So now I've presented a few of the tools that can be used to

investigate the conscious and unconscious aspect of consumer choices.

And what is important to understand is that each tool can be used separately and

in the combination to each other to reach different kind of goals.

So the most important thing is to understand what you are searching for, and

then which kind of combination of the tools can help you to achieve your goal.

>> The motivation school is related to what we call approach and

avoidance behaviors, and

it's based on something like 20 to 25 years of scientific research.

Basically what happens is that the frontal part of your brain,

the prefrontal cortex has an asymmetry to how it's engaged.

When we see a stronger activation of the left frontal cortex as opposed to

the right frontal cortex,

we see that that is highly related to approach behaviors and motivation.

In opposition to that, stronger activation in the right frontal cortex as opposed to

the left frontal cortex seems to be related to avoidance behaviors.

With EEG you can measure a lot of different things.

Here we can focus on three different aspects.

One, we can measure arousal.

So that is very much related to changes in pupil dilation,

changes in respiration and pulse.

That is an indication of how relevant a person finds something.

The second is the, what we can call the cognitive load.

So this is an index of how much information people are processing at

any one time.

And finally we can measure things like motivation, which is we can call a,

an approach versus an avoidance behavior.

And that concludes this introduction to how we are using eye tracking and

what the signal means in understanding consumer attention, but

also how we are using EEG to understand emotional and

cognitive responses by measuring their brain responses.

And how we are using these tools to better understand consumer behavior both in

stationary and

lab settings, but also in mobile settings such as in store environments.